A couple of years ago, a professor at my university had a very interesting thought exchange with the class I was in. We were a small group, and I knew most of them, they were my friends. Anyway, we had a talk about language purism - not an unimportant subject if you study English in The Netherlands.

It is generally well known that despite how much value for money (even if it were the case in apples computers) people will still go for cheaper products.

There are a few things to consider from apples point of view:

1) perhaps apple feels that the dilution of their brand to other manufacturers will reflect badly on them i.e. badly working hardware causes osx to function less optimally.

2) Dilution causes the expectation from consumers that apple should support other hardware. No matter how many disclaimers there are.

3) I imagine a lot of people only tolerate the hardware in order to get osx. (my laptop has roughly the same specs as a good macbook pro for at least 600 euros less with more usb ports and other slots).

I suspect that apple does not want to get relegated to the same territory ms is in whereby they produce nice hardware but then suffers massively from having to support every computer on the planet. If you look at the xbox you can see that ms can produce very nice software if they target a specific piece of hardware (rather crappy hardware tho!).

Exactly right. And I think it also applies to other, proprietary dinosaurs (mentioning no names, of course). Products should compete on their own merits, they shouldn't be forced on anyone. And I think that these days, 99% of the hardware you are going to use would work, on, say, Linux (even on my multifunctional, duplex, printer/scanner/fax/copier from HP, EVERYTHING works in Linux). Guess where the problems are? The graphics card in my desktop, which uses a proprietary driver for 3D and 2D acceleration.

Personally, if I weren't bothered about FOSS software (and many people aren't), I would gladly buy MacOS X if I could buy it cheaply and install it easily and legally on {insert any PC make here}. I would have bought a Mac already, if it weren't more expensive than an equivalent PC (and here in the UK, stuff that retails for $500 in the US is liable to retail for £500, i.e. almost double the cost to the American consumer). Now that the only chip that differentiates a Mac from a PC is the EFI (which isn't even proprietary to Apple, but a standard on Itanium), there really isn't much of an excuse for making Apple products expensive OR for keeping the OS tied to their hardware. I bet it would knock the socks off Windows 7 (apart from the strange drag-a-disk-icon-to-the-Trashcan feature, which I never liked but which might well now be gone).

I suspect that apple does not want to get relegated to the same territory ms is in whereby they produce nice hardware but then suffers massively from having to support every computer on the planet. If you look at the xbox you can see that ms can produce very nice software if they target a specific piece of hardware (rather crappy hardware tho!).

Microsoft makes money from software they write. Apple makes money form hardware they sell. And thay make money by tying the software to hardware. Because is the software who sells the hardware. Any rational human being wont buy some hardware from someone when they can buy the same hardware for less.

And Microsoft don't support hardware. It's the hardware makers who provide the drivers.